Friday, March 12, 2010

Why would clergy, of all people, want to go public with their sexual preferences?

I am a humble blogger. I have no responsibilities. But you don’t see me tearing up the blogosphere talking about my sexual orientation. You don’t read long horny blog posts from me discussing what it was like to be a hound dog in Seventh-Adventism, Judaism and the academy.

No, sirree, I believe these matters should be private.

Why would one want to talk to the world about one’s sexual tastes?

This seems particularly inappropriate for clergy. For bloggers and novelists and actors and musicians, fine. But people who are supposed to be moral leaders?

Why would morally serious people want to identify themselves to the world by their taste in sex? So you’re a bloke who likes to bugger other blokes, why preach that from the pulpit?

Everyone I know has particular sexual preferences. Some like to be spanked. Some like it in the context of adultery. Some can’t get excited unless there’s pain. But these people don’t identify themselves to the world by what they like in the bedroom.

I just posted on his Facebook: “Dude, did you get laid in Angwin? I felt like I was the only one who never did… SDA girls were goody girls as far as I found. I was a virgin until I was 22… You were always precocious, playing quarterback…slick with the girls. How old were you when you lost it?”

An old friend responds: “”Luke…the girls weren’t goody girls…they were just smart!!”

I never did anything naughty with a Seventh-Day Adventist girl. I never did anything naughty until I was 22.

(Rod did it first when he was 15.)

The closest to naughty I ever got was the summer of 1983 when a bunch of us got in the hot tub one Shabbos afternoon. There was a girl with us in a bikini (my age, we’d all known her for years). And about five guys.

Most of the time, I’m the happy-go-lucky moral leader you all love and enjoy.

A moral leader for the whole family!

I strike dramatic poses. I say dramatic things. I get into dramatic conflicts. I write out my dramatic feelings.

Oh, it is all such fun. So grand! So childish.

And then the loss comes rolling in. I’ll be silly on my blog, I’ll be clowning on my live cam, and then I realize that I am 43, never married, no children, tenuated ties to others, little community. And that feeling of loss keeps expanding until it weighs down my heart and I just feel hollow inside.

I have a hard time sleeping with someone. I feel like it is against the Torah. I feel like I am not living up to my highest ideals. I feel like my dad might walk in any minute and say, “Son, what are you doing?”

So I normally like to kick my ladies to the bottom of the bed and have them sleep at my feet. Then in the morning, when I’m awake, I bring them up for a quick cuddle before I shower and say my prayers.

But there was this one woman who wouldn’t be kicked away so easily.

She was taking Ambien. And she was a very snuggly cuddly girl.

And we’d snuggle and cuddle until I got sleepy — our sex lives had ended weeks before (love of chess extended our relationship by about six months) — and then I push her towards the bottom of the bed.

She didn’t get the hint.

So I grabbed her little feet and dragged her to her rightful place and gave her a comforter and a pillow and told her to rejoice in her lot.

This film explores the complex intersection of religion, identity, and sexuality through the stories of gay Adventists who are often faced with a gut-wrenching decision. They must choose between the church they were raised to believe is God’s true remnant church and their innate desire for an intimate, loving relationship. Or is there a way to reconcile their faith and their identity?

From page two: “For the Alexander Technique doesn’t teach you something new to do. It teaches you how to bring more practical intelligence into what you are already doing: how to eliminate stereotyped responses; how to deal with habit and change. It leaves you free to choose your own goal but gives you a better use of yourself while you work towards it.”

“Alexander and his brother, A.R. Alexander (1874-1947), developed a way of using their hands to convey information directly through the kinaesthetic sense. They gave their pupils an immediate “aha” experience of performing a habitual act — walking, talking, breathing, handling objects, and the like — in a non-habitual way. The technique changed the underlying feeling tone of a movement, producing a kinaesthetic effect of lightness that was pleasurable and rewarding and served as the distinguishing hallmark of non-habitual responses.”

Thursday, March 11, 2010

I often get people emailing in about blog posts and videos I’ve made. They want changes. They have corrections. They think I’ve been unfair. They offer feedback.

What they don’t have, most of the time, is a link to the blog post or video in question.

They don’t realize that the blog post they’ve been worrying about is not on my mind. They act as though what absorbs them absorbs me too.

It doesn’t.

That’s why rules of social engagement are important. When I deal with smart cultured people, they usually include links to what they’re talking about because they’ve been educated that what is important to you is often peripheral to others.

There are far more male singles in Southern California than female singles (while New York has the opposite ratio). Orthodox guys in LA often fly to New York for shiduchim (finding a spouse).

If you’re not learning at least an hour a day with texts in their original language, you’re a pretend Orthodox Jew. Los Angeles is filled with these. If you’re an Orthodox guy and you’re not married by the time you’re 30, you’re probably using porn, chasing strippers, ordering hookers, bedding down shiksas and complaining you can’t find a religious girl while you daven in Orthodox shuls.

West Coast religion is considerably more watered-down than its Mid-West and East-Coast relatives. It’s more a uniform that you put on and take off when convenient.

On hour one of his radio show today, Dennis Prager read a snide letter reproving Dennis for talking about “global warming” instead of “climate change.”

Dennis: The mental gymnastic that those of you who continue to believe that carbon dioxide emission from humans will wreak havoc on the planet because of over-heating.

I’m corrected all the time now: “Don’t use the term “global warming.” That was made up by the press. We never use global warming. We use climate change.”

They used “global warming” at the beginning but now the globe isn’t warming, it’s freezing. Remember how they predicted the most horrific hurricanes? We had one of the mildest hurricane seasons ever, but it doesn’t matter. Whenever they are caught in their phony predictions, they move on to new environmentalist religious rhetoric. Truth doesn’t matter.

I want to clarify the chicanery of calling it “climate change” instead of “global warming.”

Let’s say it was climate change. So what? The only thing people care about is global warming.

Give me one good reason for not using the term global warming. Why object? If the world isn’t warming, then there’s no danger, right?

A young man converting to Judaism tells me: “The problem I have is that most orthodox women (90% +???) won’t recognize a ger (a convert to Judaism) unless he has an RCA-approved conversion.”

I don’t think that’s true. Unless you want to be chareidi, you’ll be fine in Orthodox life with an LA Beit Din or non-RCA approved conversion to Judaism.

If you do want to be chareidi, getting that initial Orthodox conversion to Judaism, even if it is not approved by the RCA, will make your life 100% easier.

Any Orthodox non-charedi girl who tells you that your LA Beit Din conversion is not good enough is just feeding you a line to get rid of you.

I remember at LimmudLA a man asking about his wife’s conversion status with Rabbi Michael Melchior. The wife had done a non-RCA approved Orthodox conversion to Judaism. Should he worry? Rabbi Melchior told him not to worry.

On his radio show Jan. 11, 2010, Dennis Prager said about U.S. Senate majority leader Harry Reid’s remarks about Barack Obama being more electable because he was a light-skinned black man who only spoke with a “negro dialect when he wants to”: “I am embarrassed as an American that this is big news.

“I think Harry Reid is one of those who are leading the United States to disaster.”

“I do not care what people say privately. We have started to think that private things muttered to a friend tells us all we need to know about a person… When these writers write these comments, they just make people more wary about opening up to friends and colleagues. It is a self-imposed totalitarianism.

“What is it about totalitarianism that is so frightening? That what you say in private is monitored.”

“The reporting of what people say privately? Tell me why that is different then what the Stasi did in East Germany. Why is this noble? Does it tell you things you need to know about a character?”

From page 178: The pattern of startle (which has been studied by high-speed photography) is remarkably regular. It begins with an eye-blink; the head is then thrust forward; the shoulders are raised and the arms stiffened; abdominal muscles shorten; breathing stops and the knees are flexed.

The startle pattern is a model of other slower response patterns: fear, anxiety, fatigue and pain all show postural changes from the norm which are similar to those that are seen in startle. In all of them there is a shortening of neck muscles which displaces the head, and which is usually followed by some kind of flexion response, so that the body is drawn into a slightly smaller space. As in startle these postural responses cannot take place without the prior displacement of the head and the shortening of neck muscles.

Leaders of the Chabad movement declined to speak on the record about Mr. Rosenberg, but in general, they say he has exaggerated the degree of messianism in the movement and that he is driven to settle scores. Even they, though, acknowledge he has gotten some embarrassing things right.

“Shmarya often reminds me of journalism in the old days — when editors would sometimes go at one another physically in the street,” Jonathan D. Sarna, a historian of American Jewry at Brandeis University with expertise in Jewish journalism, wrote in an e-mail message. “I know that he is fiercely hated in some Orthodox circles, but he has had many a scoop, and is certainly THE destination for those who want dirt about Orthodoxy exposed to the world.”

There have been a lot of articles written about Shmarya Rosenberg but this is far and away the best one yet. It really gives you a sense of the man, what drives him, and what are his strengths and weaknesses.

Happiness is defined as “doing well something that interests you.” It can be seen at its clearest in a healthy child at play whose pleasure resides in the satisfaction of making something work. This satisfaction, Alexander says, can be established even more strongly when the mechanism that is made to work is the child’s own. Here he describes vividly the change in facial expression and the look of pleasure that a child shows when he suddenly discovers in a lesson that he can do easily and in a coordinated manner something he has always done awkwardly before, realizing, for example, that he can in this way improve his skill in games. “It’s a happiness,” Alexander said, “which increases with the psycho-physical improvement.” In marked contrast is the unhappiness shown by most adults as they approach middle age and realize that they are not improving in themselves but deteriorating. Success is essential to happiness in everyone. When happiness cannot be obtained in the ordinary way, in the satisfaction of using oneself optimally in the routine of everyday life, a person will begin pursuing specific pleasures. People unfortunately have been taught to make the routine activities of daily life automatic and as far as possible unconscious. This leads to a condition of stagnation and the harmful demand for specific excitements and stimulations, none of which can possibly produce real happiness. Such happiness can only be obtained by restoring to a person his own sensory standard so that he can gradually re-establish a pattern of growth and self-satisfaction that will carry him beyond middle age and into old age. Happiness, then, consists in the sensory satisfaction that comes with an increase of self-knowledge and control. This satisfaction extends to all aspects of living (including, of course, the sexual).

When happiness cannot be obtained in the ordinary way, in the satisfaction of using oneself optimally in the routine of everyday life, a person will begin pursuing specific pleasures. People unfortunately have been taught to make the routine activities of daily life automatic and as far as possible unconscious. This leads to a condition of stagnation and the harmful demand for specific excitements and stimulations, none of which can possibly produce real happiness. Such happiness can only be obtained by restoring to a person his own sensory standard so that he can gradually re-establish a pattern of growth and self-satisfaction that will carry him beyond middle age and into old age. Happiness, then, consists in the sensory satisfaction that comes with an increase of self-knowledge and control. This satisfaction extends to all aspects of living (including, of course, the sexual).

From page 53:

“The upper classes,” A.R. Alexander once said, “are never any help to you. When one of them discovers the Technique, he never tells anybody else about it. He likes to keep it for himself.” It was different with literary people. They liked to share the knowledge of something they had discovered…

Luke: “Tell me about the impact of 9/11 upon you personally and professionally.”

Steve: “It had a profound impact. When it happened, I was in Washington. I was covering sports… That job became immediately obsolete. I was tasked to cover terrorism. It took me to New York. Then the [Iraq] war started and I got caught up in the war for the better part of three years.”

“There were several books I could’ve written about Iraq. This story, both personally and professionally, resonated with me the most… The whole private security madness going on over there, the hidden quality of it, it just made it a rich topic.”

From Appendix A: “John Dewey once said that the reason F.M. Alexander’s teaching had appealed to him in the first place was not that it made him feel better (though the improvement in his health had been marked), but that it made him conscious of his total ignorance of a whole field of knowledge. The field he referred to was the knowledge of how he used himself in the ordinary activities of life. Like many intellectuals, Dewey was aware of a certain ineptness in the performance of physical tasks. If he was going to get up from a chair, or sit down, or pick up something he had dropped, he would do it awkwardly, and his aim was to get it over with as quickly as possible so as to get on to something more suited to his abilities, like “thinking.” Alexander made him realize that his impressions and beliefs about his own physical activities were as appropriate a field as any for the exercise of constructive thought.”

Dr. Jones writes about John Dewey: I asked Dewey about his early experiences with the Alexander Technique. He said he had been taken by it first because it provided a demonstration of the unity of mind and body. He thought that the demonstration had struck him more forcibly than it might have struck someone who got the sensory experience easily and quickly, because he was such a slow learner. He had always been physically awkward, he said, and performed all actions too quickly and impulsively and without thought. “Thought” in his case was saved for “mental” activity, which had always been easy for him. (Alexander told me that when Dewey first came to him he was “drugged with thinking” and used to fall asleep during lessons.) It was a revelation to discover that thought could be applied with equal advantage to everyday movements.

From page two: “For the Alexander Technique doesn’t teach you something new to do. It teaches you how to bring more practical intelligence into what you are already doing: how to eliminate stereotyped responses; how to deal with habit and change. It leaves you free to choose your own goal but gives you a better use of yourself while you work towards it.”

“Alexander and his brother, A.R. Alexander (1874-1947), developed a way of using their hands to convey information directly through the kinaesthetic sense. They gave their pupils an immediate “aha” experience of performing a habitual act — walking, talking, breathing, handling objects, and the like — in a non-habitual way. The technique changed the underlying feeling tone of a movement, producing a kinaesthetic effect of lightness that was pleasurable and rewarding and served as the distinguishing hallmark of non-habitual responses.”

The rabbinic commentator Ramah said about accusations of adultery that women are believed (if they confess to adultery). The assumption is if the woman says it, it must be true, because it would be too embarrassing to lie about.

That’s no longer true.

Twenty years ago, a public accusation of adultery would end a rabbi’s career. Now people are more skeptical of such charges.

If the rabbi fights back and says it is not true, then people tend to hear him out. If the rabbi quits his job and leaves town, then they tend to believe the accusations of sexual impropriety.

Donna Burstyn says: So what happens to a blended family when the family doesn’t blend? It’s hard to imagine people raised in different atmosphere getting married. I think it’s more of a miracle that people stay married than not. Given that people grow up in different countries, different cultures, different religions, different viewpoints, different personalities, and usually in the years 20-30, they choose to marry and vow to commit to one another for the rest of their lives, it’s fascinating. Those that stay married to the end are quite remarkable given that life brings so many surprises. People grow and change and want different things. They demand different things at different ages. Life throws some hardballs. Yet there are people who survive as a unit after 50 or 60 years. That’s a miracle given our divorce rate of about 60%.

Thursday, March 4, 2010

“You see the end of things right from the beginning,” says his therapist.

He’s jolted. “My previous therapist said that,” he says. “Not the one before you, but the one before the one before you. She said I was always prepared for loss. That I always expected the teat to go dry. That I’d just suck away for all I could get because I felt sure it would go dry.”

“Your writing comes first for you,” says his therapist.

“Yes,” he says. “It’s number one. That makes decision-making easy. Everything else in my life, everyone else in my life, is subordinate to my writing. It doesn’t matter if I am lying in the gutter or davening at shul or standing on a porn set. They are all opportunities to write. Each perspective is but raw material in my artistic hand.

“I’m all about the work. I’m ready to sacrifice everything for my art.”

I know what you’re thinking. The Moral Leader, he could never relate to a sinner like me. The Leader lives on such a high plane, he’s achieved such a resounding victory over the Satan, he could never understand the struggles of a wicked creature such as myself. The Leader, he lives his life by G-d’s immutable moral law, while I just struggle on, doing the best I can, I’m only flesh and blood.

Please don’t think this way. The Leader understands.

The Leader just watched the French film Lila Says and was deeply shook up.

This film has propelled me to my Bible to look up verses about wanton women and to paste them in between these photos from the film.

According to Wikipedia, the novel Lila Says was first published in France in 1996: “Lila Says is a narrative of the protagonist’s — Chimo, an Arab boy living in France — interactions with a catholic girl named Lila. Lila befriends Chimo and tells him very provocative and somewhat troubling incidents in her life and shares her experiences with him.”

I have not noticed a change. When you write something that affects people, you will get feedback and pressure in direct relationship to the importance of what you write. I started getting death threats in 1997.

I found that over the years, people got smarter in how they reacted to me. It became more and more rare for people to call me up to yell at me. People probed for my weaknesses and when they found them, they used them to get back at me.

It’s been many years since people bothered me about my blog. I find that few people are willing to confront me directly. They either reason with me very nicely or they leave me alone.

I’m not married. I don’t have kids. I don’t have one shul that I hold sacred. I don’t have one source of income. I’ve created a life where I can pretty much say what I want on my blog.

About Me

I am an Alexander Technique teacher in Beverly Hills (Alexander90210.com). I have five books available on Amazon.com. I've been blogging since 1997. I was born in Kurri Kurri, Australia, on May 28, 1966. I have lived in California since May 1977.